Know My Heart
by halftruthsandhyperbole
Summary: The fairy tale monsters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's episode of "Hush" come to the X-files as they terrorize a small town in pursuit of their seven hearts.


Scully started that morning as she always did. She woke, splashed her face with cold water, and brushed her teeth while she read a cheap paperback novel that could take an accidental toothpaste splatter or two. She kept these novels hidden away, pulp fictions she bought up for quarters at old library sales, moldering bookshops, or that had been left behind on bus stops in the middle of nowhere. They were science fiction, with skimpily clad women on the covers in space suits that wouldn't keep them safe the terror of life much less the void of space.

They were trash and she loved them and she kept them hidden away where family couldn't see, where Mulder couldn't see, her own little secret in her own space.

As she buttoned down her shirt, she considered that it had been some time since they had had an X-file. Mulder would be fidgety, flipping up pencils with a rhythmic thump against the ceiling, thoughts going in hamster circles as he cooked up another theory explaining the government conspiracies, the extra-terrestrials, and other paranormal activity that had become part of her day-to-day life.

She looked forward to these conversations, she looked forward to the challenge they represented. Still, when she caught glimpse of the I WANT TO BELIEVE POSTER and Mulder behind the desk, waiting for her with an eager smile on his face, she knew that something had come and there would be a couple of plane tickets to another place in the middle of nowhere.

"You'll never guess, Scully," Mulder said.

Scully sat on the desk, looked down at him. "I don't think I'll need to guess when you'll just tell me in a few moments anywhere."

"A little excitement, Scully."

He pushed a folder towards her and she opened it. Crime scene photos of three different deaths were neatly pinned and clipped. Their hearts had been removed. She looked a little closer at the scenes. There was no sign of animal bites or anything that would indicate a wolf had mauled them. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him leaning towards her, waiting to hear what she might say. Judging from the missing heart, she judged that he was already considering werewolves. "What about this indicates some kind of animal attack?"

Mulder spread his palms. "Werewolves aren't animals, Scully. They're monsters."

"Mulder, judging from this photo, I would assume that these victims had their hearts removed surgically. These marks here—" and she pointed at the photo and tilted them so that Mulder could se—"indicate the use of a scalpel. Besides," Scully added, flipping the file closed, "the moon wasn't right for a werewolf. It wasn't full last night."

Mulder leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest, rumpling his already wrinkled shirt. "Well, look at you, witchy woman."

Scully rolled her eyes. This was why she hadn't wanted to tell Mulder about her very scientific dabblings in witchcraft in the first place.

"But it would make sense why a werewolf would need a scalpel if they're pillaging hearts on a night where they are not—transformed."

"Or it could be the work of a serial killer, Mulder."

Mulder slid his plane tickets towards her. "Well, how will we know unless we go check it out?"

Scully picked up her ticket and sighed. They would land in Denver and then it would be another several hour drive before they reached the crime scene. Her muscles already cramped at the thought.

"Hey, at least it means we won't have to be stuck in the office all day."

The flight was uneventful. The weather was good, and Mulder slept on the plane as was his habit, and Scully kept awake, reading the magazines tucked in the back of a chair while she sipped her ginger ale. If was a short flight from D.C, and Mulder woke when the plane was taxing down the runway.

He looked up at her, his hair mussed and a hazy sleep still in his eyes. "Are we there yet, Scully?"

"You been thinking about that profile, Mulder?" Scully said, even though she knew he hadn't.

"I don't think we can apply human psychology to werewolves."

Scully hauled down her small suitcase, the one that held just two changes of clothes since they shouldn't be there for that long. "Aren't you using your conclusion to prove your premise?"

"When have I ever been wrong? Remember—that town in Texas? You didn't think it was vampires but they were. You didn't even want to be there—vampires, Scully! If you ask me, we're overdue for werewolves."

That time in Texas. Scully wanted to say that there could have been any number of explanations for the glowing eyes—the drugs they'd been given for one—and that an entire population of trailer homes moving on from their trailer park didn't necessarily indicate vampirism but she didn't. "Did you get someone to feed your fish?"

"Frohicky agreed. I was tempted to ask Skinner just to see his face."

"He probably would have said yes," Scully said.

Mulder glanced behind him toward her as they filed off the plane. "What makes you say that?"

"I once asked him to watch my dog—when you dragged me somewhere on the weekend when the sitter couldn't make it." She missed Queequeg. She still had a bag of food stashed in her cupboard even though she'd never gotten another dog to eat. She couldn't really justify caring for another one. She was gone too long, too frequently.

But still.

She missed that dog.

They rented a car, a convertible, and Mulder zipped down the highway with the top down since they found out only later that the air conditioner was broken. The wind blew her hair as she stared out the world with her thick-rimmed sunglasses, the kind tinged with just a hint of green. It was a bright day, the very height of summer, and the heat was heavy against her skin and she felt her eyes close as Mulder sped and sped down a straight highway. He cracked open his sunflower seeds, spitting the shells out the window like broken bug carapaces splattering someone else's windshield.

She leaned deeper into the seat. The motor thrummed through her bones.

She fell into those hazy-dazy sleeps, the kind where she could never be sure if she were awake or if she were sleeping.

Mulder held out his hand, and she glanced towards him expecting that he was offering a handful of seeds as was his habit. His palm was cupped, but his hand was empty.

"Take my hand, Scully," he said.

She reached out for him, her fingertips finding the pulse points in his wrist as she let her hand rest in his.

"Don't you think we should talk about it?" Mulder asked.

"Talk about what?" Scully looked down at his hand, at the way his fingers curled around the fine bones of her wrist. His hands were warm and dry.

"What happened so many months ago, when I thought they were going to split us up?"

"Which time?" Scully laughed but her throat was dry, filling up with sand as she closed her eyes.

"The worst time," Mulder said. "When I thought I'd lost you for good."

She remembered. Of course she did. His hands had cupped her face, his fingers a firm pressure against the curve of her skull, the weight tugging at her hair and her skin. And then they had been interrupted and she had almost died even though it had been prophesied by a dead man that she would not die.

Mulder should not have been afraid.

"We don't need to talk about that," Scully murmured. They were in balance as they had always been. Mulder had found his purpose, his belief, once more. And she had stepped into place beside him with her strict rationalism and her science even as she wanted to believe with a quiet intensity that sometimes frightened her.

"Scully," Mulder said. With his other hand, he tipped the rearview mirror at a sloping downward angle.

She wanted to tell him that he should have both hands on the wheel. Or one, at the very least. At the last moment, she saw that he had braced his knee against the steering wheel.

"Who is that in the back seat, Scully?" Mulder asked.

His eyes weren't on the road. They were looking through the mirror.

She turned her head, craning her neck until her spine cracked from her jaw down the middle of her back. There was someone back there, a child, but the sun, even though it had been high noon a few moments ago, was already setting, and a sheer blade of light slid between her eyes, blinding her so that she could only see a dark shadow speaking to her with a muted voice that was somehow familiar to her.

"Can't shout, can't cry," the voice softly said.

Scully visored her gaze with her hand so that she could block out the sun but it didn't work and she could still barely see. She thought there might be a small box of some kind on the child's lap. "Who are you?"

"The Gentlemen are coming by, to look in your windows, knock on your door. They need seven, so they might take yours."

"Seven what?" Scully tried to reach towards the figure in the back but her hand tangled in the seat belt.

"Can't call out, can't say a thing. You'll die screaming, but you won't be heard."

She wasn't going to die. Nobody was going to die. And the last time she'd called her mother was when—she couldn't remember. She asked again, "Who are you?" Then, out of the corner of her eye, someone leaning from the shadows, sheer slide of profile, lips pinned back into a knife-like grin-

"What was that, Scully?"

Scully blinked the sun from her eyes. It was noon again. Her mouth tasted old and stale, like grandma's attic. Her hands were folded in her lap. She rubbed her wrist over her lips. She looked over her shoulder, but the back seat was empty. Only her suitcase and Mulder's backpack were stashed there.

"Thirsty?" Mulder handed her a bottle of water and she drank deeply from it. "You got your cooties all over it," he said as he took it back from her and drank, putting his lips where hers had been a few moments ago. "You okay, Scully? I'd joke that it looks like you've seen a ghost, but you don't believe in ghosts."

"How long have we been driving?"

"About thirty minutes."

Scully sat up a little straighter, hoping it would help her wake a little more, that she wouldn't feel so displaced and fuzzy and uncoordinated. "I had a dream, Mulder."

"You were barely even asleep."

"I know. But I had a dream—there was someone here and we were—" she stopped, feeling embarrassed even though she shouldn't be embarrassed, there was nothing to be embarrassed about. It was irrational, and so she tried to ignore it.

"We were what?" Mulder's gaze slid from the road towards her, his mouth lifted up a little bit into something almost a smile but not quite.

"Driving," Scully said. "We were still in the car."

"And who was with us?"

"I don't know." She told him about what the child had said.

"Sounds like something out of a story to me," Mulder said. "But maybe it's got something to do with the case. You know they say that they were found in their beds and that nobody had heard anything."

"Well, there could be lots of reasons nobody heard them being killed. They could have been alone or they could have been drugged or just really sound sleepers."

"But their hearts were torn out, Scully," Mulder said. "People don't just sleep through that."

Scully rolled her eyes. "They were surgically removed, which happens dozens of times a day in hospitals across the United States, and they use anesthetic so that their patients feel nothing."

She took some small satisfaction that Mulder didn't have a rebuttal for that one. His mouth opened like he wanted to say something, but then he just shook his head and reached for the radio, turning it up so that they could hear country tunes crooning from under the white noise of the static.

"I guess they don't get good radio reception here," Mulder said as he switched it back off again.

"Well, we're in the middle of nowhere—what more would you expect?"

They drove across land so flat Scully could see the curve of the horizon. There was a map in the glove compartment, and she unfolded it, afraid for a moment that there wouldn't be anything along this stretch of road, not a town or a gas station or anything really.

She could be in her bath right now. She had started to grow roses to make her own rose water. It relaxed her. It made her smell nice. It made her feel nice. Not like driving down these desert roads, the heat sticking to her skin, the dirt sticking to her sweat, the heat screwing migraines into her temple. She sighed as she leaned back against her seat.

"What is it?"

"It's nothing," Scully said. She'd had this conversation before with Mulder. It never went anywhere, just like they'd never get anywhere in this car, just like the roads were different but the destination was the same only with more questions and fewer answers.

He reached over and patted her arm. "We're almost there."

After what seemed a long time, Mulder pulled into a gas station. It was the sort of place that seemed perpetually lost in time, where the font was always a decade too old, the white paint peeling from the walls. It was the kind that used plastic squares to display the cost, and it was always at least ten cents higher than it should be. "It's extortion, Mulder," she said as he unscrewed the gas cap.

Mulder shrugged. "It's not like we're paying for it. Got Big Brother to thank for that one. Least they can do, honestly."

Scully couldn't argue with that.

She knew she should get out of the car, stretch her legs, but she didn't want to get out. The nap she had had earlier was hanging heavy on her limbs. She felt lethargic, like a cat might feel like, lying on the carpet, in a square of sun.

Maybe she could get a cat. They got on better by themselves than a dog did—cats weren't pack creatures in need of a pack hierarchy. They liked to be alone, didn't they?

"Here you go," Mulder said, his voice surprising her and she lifted her sunglasses from her face so that she could squint at him through the desert sun.

He held a small thing of yogurt, low fat, plain.

"Thought you might be hungry—and thirsty." He handed her a Snapple, strawberry kiwi flavored.

"Thanks," she said. The bottle was already slick with condensation, but it was cold and it felt good as she held it to her head.

"You want me to put the top up?" Mulder slid into the driver's side, the leather creaking under his weight and the heat. She wondered that it didn't burn them through their clothes.

She shook her head. The breeze felt nice, like there was actual air instead of the heat, thick as cotton balls wadding up her throat.

"Well since there's no radio," Mulder said as he pulled out of the station, dust pluming from the tires, "looks like we're just gonna have to sing our own songs. Know what the current top forty is? Or maybe you could finish singing Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog. You never did get past the second verse."

Scully couldn't help but laugh. "I can't believe you remember that."

"Well, how could I forget? Me, falling asleep in the arms of a beautiful woman-" He leaned over to grin at her, eyebrows raised all the way up.

"That's not how it happened, Mulder, and you know it. You were cold and going into shock."

"I suppose that's the scientific explanation."

Scully squinted out the windshield, the sun so bright she could barely stand it. "It's the only explanation."

Mulder cleared his throat and Scully gripped the slick leather of her seat, already smiling but already preparing for his high pitched, off key rendition of Walk Like a Man.

Scully watched him, eyes shaded by his thick sunglasses, his mouth pursed too much during the musical interludes, his shoulders rolling in time with the beat, palms slapping the steering wheel.

The road stretched on, spinning beneath their wheels as Scully leaned back against her chair, hair flapping around her ears and her mouth, Mulder's voice blurring with the smooth whine of the engine as he sped too fast, his wrist hanging limp over the rim of the wheel now that he was singing a tune with a slower rhythm, made even slower since Mulder was exaggerating the pace.

She knew what he was doing—trying to get her to open her eyes, to lean over and slap him on the arm or something like that, or to join in, but she didn't. She laid back with her eyes closed and just listened and fell back asleep.

"Wakey, wakey, Scully," Mulder said, hand heavy on her shoulder. "We're finally here."

Scully's mouth was sticky with sleep, and she swallowed as she raised herself up. It was one of those small towns, the kind that was still trying to pass itself off as retro and vintage with the barber shop red ribbons spiraling up the pillars like candy-canes, only the paint was dirty and faded. Just a casual glance out the window revealed empty seats and a bored teenager reading a magazine—not that Scully could blame her.

It seemed like the kind of town that Scully would have wanted to get out of were she that same teenager many years ago.

It was the kind of town with one major intersection, and there was a church planted on each corner, each one a different denomination.

Each church was draped in black, folds of dark fabric fluttering in the faint desert breeze. Wreaths of wilting flowers hung on the doors.

"How many people have died?" Scully asked.

"Four," Mulder said. "What are the odds it'd be one from each church?"

"Well, if it were a werewolf the chances would be random. Or if it were a killer perhaps it would be more likely."

Mulder shook his head. "You're going to count this as one in your favor, aren't you?"

Scully graced him with one of her small smiles. "You can't argue with the facts, Mulder."

To be honest, Scully was surprised that the town was even large enough to justify having a morgue. In retrospect, as she looked at the body beside flanks of raw steer meat still frozen on the bone hanging from the ceiling, she didn't know why she was expecting anything less.

She pulled on her gloves, the latex edges snapping against her wrist, and went to work.

Mulder was lounging on the bed in the motel, shoes already kicked off, eating sunflower seeds when she returned. There was a small pile of husks on the side of the bed, but at least they were (mostly) on a strip of toilet paper. The warped image of some kind of nature documentary flickered across the small television.

"So what'd you find?"

He reached across the bed for a tall glass of water, already beaded with condensation, the cubes of crushed ice already mostly melted. She wondered if the air were broken since it was so hot in here. His shirt slipped up over his skin as he drank and as she sank down into the nearby chair, kicking off her own shoes as she did so. She relished, for a moment, the stretch through her fatigued arch that always came from wearing her nice FBI woman shoes.

She should wear boots more often, not just when she was tromping through forests and swamps and wherever else the crime brought her or Mulder dragged her.

"Well?" He wiped the water dribbling down his chin with his wrist.

"If you're looking for evidence of werewolves not one of the bodies has a bite or any kind of injury indicating that they were eaten alive by some big bad wolf."

"Only their hearts would have been eaten, Scully."

"None of these were little red riding hoods," Scully said. "I don't know what to tell you other than you should start working up a profile." She tapped her temple. "That's more your areas of expertise than mine."

"Oh yes. You just lay out the cold hard facts. Like surgical tools prepped for some slicing and dicing."

"It's not slicing and dicing, Mulder," Scully said.

He waved his hand as if he would brush her words away. Scully watched the television, the rainbow blips of bleeding color as the picture warped and shifted with their crappy reception.

"You think this town has a pizza place?"

He answered without looking at her. "Already checked. And they do. And I've already ordered two pies so that when the moon hits our eyes it's amore." He kissed his fingertips and fluttered them towards her.

She rolled her eyes. "But the real question. Toppings?"

Mulder sighed. "Pepperoni like a normal person for me. And pineapples for a heathen like you. Extra cheese, for both of us."

"Which would certainly explain your behavior."

Mulder gasped, hand to heart as he slumped back down onto the bed.

They watched the television together until there was a knocking on the door and they glared at each other until Scully said, "I've been on my feet all day while you've been snacking—" she gestured at the husks of sunflower seeds.

So he heaved himself off the bed and got the pizzas, passing the tip without counting it out and closing the door with the ball of his foot as he turned back towards the room.

"Honey, I'm home."

They ate. They licked their fingers. Mulder tapped the corner of his mouth to indicate that she had something there, but when she wiped the spot with her napkin it came back clean. His mouth opened in a silent grin and he pointed his finger at her.

 _Gotcha._

She rolled her eyes, ignoring him and they turned their eyes back to the television, flickering and warped, the sound stitched with buzzing noises and not quite in sync with the video.

"Glad we're not paying extra for this," Mulder said. His eyes were closed, hands folded over his belly.

She should go. This was supposed to have been her room but it was too late and he'd never give it up now. Easier to just go to the other room they'd reserved

"Goodnight, Mulder" she said, rising. Her hips popped as she stood to her feet, and it hurt, a little bit. She should stretch or run but it was hot and she was tired, so she closed the door softly behind her and she went to the neighboring room. It had that smell that all motel rooms had, air that wasn't quite fresh but also wasn't stale. It smelled like stiff laundry detergent and cleaner, the kind with a tang of lemon.

The faucet ran, spluttering and weak, as she put a daub of toothpaste on her toothbrush and scraped at her teeth as she stared at her reflection in the mirror.

She looked tired, she thought. There was sagging around her eyes—maybe age, maybe exhaustion. Maybe both. There was something, she thought, as she switched to the other side of her mouth, that she should be doing, something that she should be thinking about, something she should be seeing to break this case open that she wasn't.

It was an old thought, one as familiar as the poster that hung in Mulder's office.

 _I want to believe_ —and she closed her eyes against the thought, like some kind of girlhood's prayer.

I want to believe.

She leaned against the sink, her wrist jutted against the hard tile, toothbrush hanging under the running stream of water. Her grandmother had told her a story once, a myth, a fairy tale, that the reason why the water had voice was because it carried all their prayers to God's ears, winged messenger angels in their own right, only they had no feet, just the limpid shapes of their running mouths.

It wasn't a story that was in the Bible, but she thought it could be.

Mulder would laugh at her.

He had faith in so many things, but not in what she did.

She wondered at that, at the dissonance, at the scorn and the mockery at times, the ones that would sometimes smart like the way her teachers had rapped her knuckles when her mind wandered as a schoolgirl.

With a shake of her shoulders, she tapped the excess water from her toothbrush and stripped herself of her clothes. She let the shower run as hot as it would go, lukewarm at best, before stepping under the weak fall of water, grime from the journey sliding down her skin, pooling around her toes.

Head hanging down, she leaned against the wall, bearing the water against her tight shoulders, knotted with stress. Water streamed over her eyes, dripped from her mouth, fell into her parted mouth.

When the water turned cold, she shook herself again and climbed out of the stall. She was shaky and tired and she didn't bother to dress into something more than just the too-small towel that'd been folded into a neat square on the bathroom counter.

The heat cloyed at her, but it was easy to sigh into something like sleep, but not so easy to stay that way. She woke, the yellow lamplight a low hanging moon through the cheap, flimsy blinds. She tried to pull the pillow over her head, to block the light, but she could not move. She could not breathe. She could not speak.

Sleep paralysis—it had once plagued her as a child and sometimes it revisited her now, as an adult, reminding her that she could still be helpless, could still be afraid. She tried to remind herself that it would pass, that this trapped feeling would go away, that it was a natural occurring phenomena, that any fear she felt was the product of irrationality and surprise.

So she waited but, when a dark shadow glided past her window, the fear returned, and she was afraid that the shadow would pause and linger beyond the glass, that it would turn its head, that it would knock upon her door and she would be compelled to answer or, if the sleep paralysis stayed true, that it would march through her door either by some vanishing act or brute force and—and what?

Crimes she had seen as an FBI agent unreeled in her mind's eye, history and memory stitched together with the vagueness of dreams, and her skin peeling from the consciousness of her thought as she squeezed her eyes shut and willed those thoughts away, whispering the prayers of her faith when it was young and new and strong, though no voice gave them body and no whisper gave up the ghost of all that she had once held dear.

The shadow glided by, and her paralysis faded away.

She took a deep breath, felt the expansion of her lungs and the creak of her ribs, and buried her face into the pillow and fell asleep once more under the crawling beams of the car lights.

Scully woke to someone knocking on her door, and she frowned, remembering the echo of nervousness and fear she had felt earlier in the night of someone knocking on her door. She frowned, trying to remember what she had seen last night.

A fist banged against her door and she tried to shout that she was coming, and her voice came as if from far away, through a hoarse and swollen throat as if she had screamed all through the night. She put her hand to the hollow of her throat, massaging the swelling down before thumping her fist against her own chest to clear the frog that had settled there like a bad cold, like goddamn allergies she always got in the middle of nowheres. "Coming," she finally said though it came out more like a croak.

The floor was cold against her bare feet as she pulled on her shirt, hopping into her pants as she fumbled for the door. Mulder stood, squinting in the sun, his hair all mussed like he too had had a restless night. He had coffee in gas station cups in both hands, one black without hardly any sugar, just the way he liked it, and weak decaf for him.

"There's been another murder," he said.

For a moment, Scully didn't know why she had been expecting anything else.

"The true crime is that it happened before breakfast." He handed her a donut.

"When did it happen?"

Mulder shrugged. "I was just told that he was awake after dinner and dead before the alarms rang for work."

She looked at the pictures, so neatly clipped. Heart removed from the chest captivity with surgical precision just like the others. Scully frowned at the photos. "I suppose they're bringing him to the same place as last time."

"I'd assume so but they want us to meet the local sheriff first. Apparently he was too busy to make time in his busy schedule to join us yesterday." Mulder shrugged.

The day was so quiet there wasn't even the hum of the engines driving. Scully looked at her watch. It was eight in the morning. People should be on their way to work. Dropping their kids off to school.

"Eerie, isn't it?" Mulder gazed at the road, leaned back like he was stretching.

Scully took a sip of bitter coffee. It tasted terrible, and she thought it was the best kind of terrible. It didn't take like the coffee from home, the kind she made herself in her French press. This tasted like the thought of home, the idea that home was just right there, beyond the horizon, if they could only make it there.

Her mouth watered at the taste of it, and she closed her eyes.

"This is so great," Mulder said. He was actually smiling.

"Right," Scully said. "Well, let's get this over with."

Against Mulder's weak protestations, she elected to walk. It was a nice day, and she still felt a faint shadow of the paralysis that had woken her in the night. Her limbs were stiff, the muscles tight, and she stretched her neck until the bones cracked.

"You alright, Scully? You seem—off."

"Yeah I just—" she fell silent. She wanted to tell Mulder about the shadow she had seen, about the paralysis. But it seemed silly now. All her fears seemed silly in the light of day. They always had been. "I just didn't sleep well last night."

"Me neither," Mulder said. "I think that it's these terrible motel beds. And there's a smell like it smells like soap but it doesn't feel like something that's been cleaned by soap?" His nose wrinkled, his lip curled, as he wiped his hands against his slacks.

Scully felt the sly smile sneak up on her. It amused her, sometimes, how easily grossed out Mulder was.

It didn't take long to walk to the sheriff's office. She imagined she could pace the circumference of this town within a few hours, so small it was. And so empty. The town was dying, its people too. Some naturally, and some murdered by a person with too sharp a knife in too clever fingers. That was the myth really, that a small town could protect people from the murders of the big cities. The big towns were dangerous with their needs unmet. The small towns dangerous with the strong preying on the weak, big fishes in a big pond overflowing its shores until there was no water left and everything wasted away. The families dangerous with their greedy, wanting fathers. The dangerous self, riddled with doubt.

There was only the desk operator when they arrived at the office. A little bell dinged over the door, and she wondered if the office had once been some kind of store. The air conditioner was broken, she was told by the old woman behind the switchboard. Their tech was decades out of date. Her white hair, streaked with grey, was tied up in a neat bun. The fly-aways stuck to her skin and Scully was beginning to feel uncomfortable in her three piece, Mulder too. Fans moved the hot air, stirring the humidity like thick soup. Paper ribbons fluttered from the iron cages that were bent around the blades.

"We apologize for the inconvenience," the old woman said. Her voice shook and broke with age.

They assured her it was no inconvenience. It's not like she could control the weather, after all.

Not that that meant anything these days.

"You'll like the sheriff and his deputy," the old woman said as she played with the water in her small Styrofoam cup. "They are such nice men, such perfect gentlemen." She looked at Scully meaningfully and Scully bit her lip and ducked her head.

Mulder edged her gently with his elbow, and they shared a glance before Scully felt the flush in her cheeks start to rise and she turned her head away. She could imagine what he'd say if they were alone. Maybe he'd sing _matchmaker matchmaker make me a match_ under his breath. While they waited for the sheriff and his deputy to return, Scully wandered the small confines of the office, observing the décor and the awards printed on office paper framed behind cheap plastic. She remembered a similar case—except the hearts had just been gone, psychically removed while there was definitely evidence of a blade at work here.

She rubbed her palm against her own chest, where the hooded figure had tried to remove her own heart. How Mulder had found her covered in blood. How scared and terrified she had been.

That was a puzzle she couldn't quite figure out, because Mulder had told her that the writer had warned him that if he read the pages that it would come to be, and he had read the pages anyway, which was how he had known she was in trouble.

She should have died that day, and she hadn't.

Her heart beat steady and slow underneath her hand, reassuring in its reliability and stability, pushing blood through her body, carrying oxygen to her cells with every breath she took.

 _Agent Scully is already in love_ , the writer had said before finishing his book and burning the pages and dying with his own heart in his hand, silent and dead and withered as it leaked blood on the floor of the boiler room.

She looked back over her shoulder at Mulder.

The bell dinged again and two men, very trim and neat in their black suits, pushed through. One was very tall, and the other was very short. They were very ready with their smiles, greeting them both with hearty grins and warm welcomes. The tall one was Sheriff Johnson, the second Deputy Robertson.

"So do you have any suspects?" Mulder asked. "This makes what five victims?"

Their smiles changed and shifted, taking a downward turn but it seemed still as if they were smiling. Scully's eyes narrowed.

"That would be correct," Johnson said while Robertson shook his head gravely. "A real tragedy."

"We're getting the crime scene set," Robertson said while Johnson bent his head and gestured grandly out the door. "We thought you'd like to take a peek before we sent the corpse on down to the slaughterhouse."

"We appreciate that," Mulder said.

"Follow us," Johnson said.

They followed. There were no squad cars and so they walked under the blazing sun. Mulder stripped out of his jacket, rolled his shirtsleeves over the elbows, and hooked his fingers under the collar of the jacket, flipping it over his shoulder so that it swayed in time with his walk.

Who could have killed five people in a small town like this? Scully looked at the sheriff and the deputy as they strode forward. They wore the uniform of the law, neatly pressed. There were no damp spots on the collar, like Mulder sported (how he hated the heat), nor did they shift uncomfortably in their jackets like she did because she wasn't like Mulder. She wore her jacket like it was part of her, something that she would not remove unless she were in the comfort of her own home.

"It must be almost a hundred degrees out here," Scully said.

"One hundred and two," Johnson said.

Robertson craned his head to look around at them. "Don't worry. You get used to it. Live here long enough and you get used to anything."

"Even serial killers?" Scully asked.

They didn't say anything to that, and Mulder tugged at the knot on his tie, tugging it a little looser so that he could undo the top button of his shirt. Scully raised her eyebrows and wiped the sweat slicking down the skin of her neck. She missed her air-conditioned room back home. Sometimes, she hated how Mulder was always dragging her to god knew where.

She didn't think this would be an X-file, no matter what Mulder said. Sometimes people killed each other. Sometimes, in a small town like this, there was just no where to run, and everybody knew each other, telling themselves that of course it couldn't be on of them, of course they knew each other so well, it would be impossible that someone they knew could do anything like that.

Easier to blame a demon. Easier to blame a ghost. Easier to blame a monster. Anything than someone who might be a loved one, that might be family.

Scully sighed, and when they arrived at the crime scene it was very similar to the others. The body, bloody, the mouth contorted as if the victim had died, screaming. Scully cringed but did not turn away as she pulled on her latex gloves.

Cursory examination confirmed that the heart had been removed with something sharp, probably a scalpel. Expertly, as if the perpetrator had done this before and was well practiced with it. Her first suspect would be a surgeon but the town was too small for a hospital and there were no licensed surgeons or individuals who had undergone any training. Nor were there any newcomers to the area.

Maybe a butcher could have done this. The work was too fine and delicate than one would normally find in such a profession but that didn't necessarily mean that such a person would be incapable of such work.

"Was he alone in the house?" she asked.

"Nope." Johnson leaned against the door jam. "Fell asleep in bed next to his wife. She was a little hysterical when she woke up all covered in his blood."

"And she's not a suspect?" Scully looked up just in time to catch Mulder roll his eyes. He was always eager to immediately jump to the weird, the strange, the paranormal. But best to rule out the normal first, best to cut these Alexandrian knots with Occam's razor.

"Not particularly." Robertson spat tobacco juice. "She's got a, medical condition with her hands. Can't grip worth a darn. Don't think she'd be able to hold a whatever this is."

"Woman used to knit all the time before her hands failed her. Still got one of those afghans she made."

Scully nodded. "I want to speak with her."

"Sure, sure. We sent her off to the kitchen so she could make a cup of tea. Peppermint's good for the stomach. Has a soothing effect."

Scully probably would have given her chamomile.

"I'll speak with her," Mulder said.

The autopsy revealed that the cause of death was not necessarily removal of the heart, but rather the trauma, blood loss, and pain immediately preceding the heart's removal. There was no evidence of drugs in his system, or in his wife's.

Yet no one had heard him scream.

"I don't understand, Mulder," she said when they departed, to return back to their decrepit motel. "Someone should have heard something."

"Just like somebody should have heard the first four deaths. I'm telling you, Scully, this has X-file written all over it."

"Did the wife have hearing problems? Maybe a deafness in one ear or considered hard of hearing?"

"Her hearing is fine. It's just her hands."

Mulder had that look in his eye, that look of relish when they ran into the unexplained and the strange. Scully licked her lips. "I found no fingerprints, Mulder. We found no murder weapons at the scene. I don't know how to stop this from happening again. I don't want to wake up to a sixth victim."

"One of us should stay awake," Mulder said. "If anybody's screaming, we'll hear them. I'll take first shift if you like."

"No. I want to review the files of all five victims, and it'll be easier if I'm already awake."

Mulder laughed a little at that. "So studious, Scully. Others would argue that a pair of fresh eyes in the morning would yield insight."

"If you want the first half to avoid waking up early, just say so, Mulder."

"No, no, no, oh no," Mulder said and they went back and forth about it, though the words passed right through her without thinking about them too much. These kind of arguments were so routine, they were almost ritual.

She took great comfort in that—took comfort in the warm flow of Mulder's voice, the definite present by her side, the way their shadows crossed in the dying light, bleeding in and out of each other with every footfall.

"See you in the morning, Scully," Mulder said as they parted beside their respective rooms.

She made some coffee before she opened the files, instant coffee in a Styrofoam cup, bitter to the taste.

One by one she went through them. Slowly, lingering over each detail, over each photo no matter how bloody and gruesome they were. She bit her lip as she turned the pages, wondering what piece of the puzzle she was missing.

Shaking her head, the heat clouding her eyes and her thoughts, she went to the window, pulled the blinds back, and opened it so that the fresh night air might come into the room. She leaned against the sill on her elbows, breathing in the heat and the drought and the dust.

It was cooler than the day, but it was still warm, and she yearned for a nice breeze, something fresh and brisk from the ocean, tinged with salt.

She closed her eyes, just for a moment. She would not sleep, but she could not bear to look upon the empty streets. When she opened them, a chill descended upon her, and her breath came out in a ghost as she rubbed the goosebumps from her arm.

Scully frowned, surprised, at the sudden shift in temperature, and briefly wondered if she had imagined it when the heat returned, the humidity from the swamp cooler hanging heavy in the air, clamming her hair to her neck.

Something moved in the darkness, and she leaned farther out the window as she shifted her gaze, trying to will her eyes to see through the night with only the dim, flickering streetlights to help her.

Something was out there, gliding in the shadows. Her breath caught in her mouth as she pushed herself from the window, wrenching open the door as she hurried down the street, one hand on her badge, the other going for her gun.

When she arrived on the corner, there was nothing there but the shadows and the chirping crickets.

Maybe it had just been the trick of the light, the flickering streetlights and the fluttering moths. Maybe the exhaustion. Maybe Mulder was right. Maybe she should have taken the second shift instead of the first. Shaking her head, she walked back towards the motel, rapping on Mulder's door to let him know that she was coming in. He still slept, the covers rucked down towards his waist, sheets tangled up around his legs. She reached out for his bare shoulder, shaking him gently, as she spoke his name even though no voice gave shape to the words.

She paused, her hand light against his skin, as she put her other towards her throat. There was no swelling, nothing that would affect her capabilities of speech.

She tried again, and her lips moved but no sound came out.

Gripping Mulder's shoulders, she shook him, hard, and he jerked awake, hand going for the gun that was on his end table before Scully stopped him, curling her fingers around his wrist, feeling his skittering heartbeat under her thumb.

His mouth opened, and she thought she recognized the shape of her name in his mouth. His eyes widened with surprise as he tried again before jerking to his feet and pacing in nervous circles around the room.

Scully sat on the corner of the mattress, fighting the rising panic that made it difficult to think clearly, to think rationally, her hands still at her throat. The chances that both she and Mulder would be unable to make their voices heard at the same time were unlikely. Still, she snapped her fingers, and Mulder stopped his pacing, whipped his head around, and met her gaze as she rose to meet him at where he stood. She reached out for his throat and neck, prodding gently at the lymph nodes, checking for swollenness or any other physiological effect that could possibly explain their missing voices.

He rolled his eyes but he let her check.

Like herself, Mulder's throat and neck felt perfectly fine, the example of health and wellbeing.

She drifted away from him, hugging her chest as her fingers twisted in the cloth of her sleeves. Their missing voices explained why nobody had heard the victims scream as they died, which would be convenient for the killer.

But how? How did someone simply steal a voice? They weren't little mermaids. Where the hell was the science?

Mulder tapped her shoulder and she turned to see that he had scrawled "fairytales" on a napkin. She rolled her eyes as she sank down at the table as he sat opposite her. He had forgotten to put on a shirt and his hands and knees were jittery as he glared at the napkin and its scrawled upon word that rested between them.

It was always like this, wasn't it—them on opposite sides of the issue. But they always found a way to meet in the middle. Slowly, she reached for the napkin and, underneath the word, she wrote, "Missing the sound of your own voice?"

He laughed a little at that, and she smiled as she wrote, "me too."

But then there was nothing really to say as Mulder brainstormed who or what could have stolen their voices, scribbling on the napkin and crossing out each one just as savagely.

When the sky turned grey, Scully rose and began to make a cup of coffee from the packets the staff had prepared for them. She leaned against the flimsy table, gripping its edges, her feet crossed at the ankle, as she watched the coffee drip-drip-drip into the paper cup.

When it was finished, she tried to hold it in her hands, but she must have slipped, though, because the coffee splashed over the lip, burning her skin. She cried out, and her voice rang stark and bare through the air, and she shuddered at the sound of it, so sudden and unexpected after so much silence even as Mulder uttered a small shriek of his own.

"Scully!" he said.

She rubbed her knuckles over her chest, pressing against her sternum as if she could reach in and soothe the ragged beating of her heart. "I guess our voices are back," she said even though it was obvious, but it was nice to fill the air noise.

"It explains everything—" he started.

"We need to find out if someone else died," she said. The fear of crying out and of no one hearing her had plagued her since she was a little girl, and she suspected she was not alone in that.

And now it was real. Now it was happening.

She didn't know how to stop it.

Didn't know who or what could have done what they had just experienced.

They met with the sheriff and his deputy. They were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. Mulder asked them if they had noticed anything strange last night and they had shaken their heads because they had slept sound as babies.

"That's not what we noticed," Mulder said but refused to say anything more.

Aside, Scully asked, "Why aren't you telling them, Mulder?"

He shrugged, microscopically. "I don't know yet."

An hour later, the sheriff received a call that another body had been found. It was a woman, like the others. As Scully pulled on her gloves, she wondered how many bodies they were going to find. She wondered where they put the hearts they took. She wondered why they were taking them. She wondered if Mulder would divine their reasoning in time to save another death.

Sometimes, she wished that she could see like he saw—to really understand and predict. But she wasn't. She was a scientist—she collected facts, theorized from them, and then proved those theories with science and rationalism.

She took comfort in the fact that even if she couldn't explain what she had experienced last night, she would be able to some day. That which she did not understand did not mean it could not be explained through scientific thought. One day, she would learn enough and she would be able to explain it.

Distantly, she heard Mulder describing to the two officers what they had experienced last night. He asked them if they had noticed anything and they said that most decent folk were abed at that time.

She thought it strange that law enforcement would be so cavalier about the deaths. Why they also had not decided to stay awake the night to see if they could catch the killer in his steps.

Scully stripped the gloves from her hand and stood with her arms folded across her chest as she considered the two men. Their backs were turned but for all they reacted it could have been Mulder describing the weather that night as opposed to a phenomena where their voices were stolen and then returned.

Mulder met her eyes over their shoulders. He thought the same thing and, when the officers departed, he said, softly, "I think we have our primary suspects, Scully."

She joined him by his side. "But how can we prove it? Last time I checked, men can't steal another's physical voice."

"Maybe they only look like men." He glanced down at her. "You know, Scully, there's a piece of the puzzle that we forgot."

"What piece?"

"Your dream. What was it the child told to you? That you'd die screaming but you wouldn't be heard?"

Scully swallowed. It fit what they had seen. But that couldn't be. "That was just a dream, Mulder, it didn't mean anything."

"No, you're wrong, Scully. They need seven, so they might take yours—you didn't know what they were talking about but it was the hearts. Scully, they're going to kill again."

"And you think the sheriff and his deputy are the Gentlemen?" Scully frowned. "There's no reason to believe that."

"No think about it, Scully. Think about how the receptionist described them to you. She said they were perfect gentlemen."

Scully scoffed. "My grandmother described perfectly fine men as that all the time. It doesn't mean anything other than it's something familiar to me. And it's just vague enough to make sense if you speculate enough. Seven what? Seven hearts? Seven livers?"

"Yeah, but it's hearts that are missing, Scully. This dream—the figure was trying to explain it to you but you're not listening!"

"I'm listening just fine, Mulder, I just don't think that what you're describing has anything to do with the facts of the case." She kept her voice firm and controlled. Dreams like what she had had were patched together from previous experiences and she had visited the work of serial killers before, she had even visited the numerous crimes where victims had had their hearts removed and nothing else before. It was just as easy to explain the dream as something her subconscious came up with, the memories of one case triggered by the similarities of this current one.

Mulder sighed and rolled his eyes. She knew that Mulder was wishing the dream had come to him. That he would believe the prophetic nature of it, the divination of it.

"I do agree with you that the sheriff and the deputy are involved," she said, as if it could serve as some kind of peace offering. "So why don't we watch them for the rest of the day and for the night. See what they might be up to."

Mulder nodded. "I like it when we agree," he said.

She liked it too but she didn't tell him that. She just rolled her eyes, and told him to come on.

They watched the officers as they pretended to work the case or eat dinner from the burger joint across the way. Scully dipped her fries in a milk shake and watched. There was something the matter with those two, she thought, as she watched them sitting at their desks. They didn't do anything. They didn't even have a board for the crimes they were supposed to be investigating.

Perhaps there would be no reason to solve the case if they were the perpetrators of the crime. "But there's no evidence, Mulder!" She hated when there was no evidence. "We've found nothing at the scene. No fibers. No prints. Nothing to point us towards a culprit, and nothing to indicate that it's them beyond our lingering suspicions regarding their behavior, which could just as well be an indication of the low caliber of their police work."

"It's them, Scully, I know it. I can feel it in my heart."

"They're not going to try and weigh your heart, Mulder. They're going to look at the evidence which we don't have." She rubbed her temples. She was getting a headache, and she dreaded the night that was coming as the sun sank lower and lower in the sky. She dreaded that they would be unable to warn the seventh victim, that ultimately there would be nothing she could do.

"You know what I'm looking forward to the most?" Mulder wiped his mouth with his napkin. "The stakeout. Sunflower seeds. Flat coke. The long hours of absolutely nothing."

"And without your ceaseless chatter to pass the time, I don't know how we'll survive the night."

He smiled at her. She liked it when he smiled at her. There was something about it, the quiet kind where his teeth were barely showing, the way it eased across his face as easily as he slouched back in his chair.

"I'll take first watch," he said later on, when they were in the rented car.

She wanted to say that they should both stay awake, but it was silly. If they both tried to keep watch for the whole night, the chances they'd both fall asleep would be high, too high to risk.

"Okay. Shake me if something happens."

She fell asleep to the sound of sunflower seeds cracking against his teeth.

The rising sun was what woke her first. She stretched, her eyes still closed against the slanting bright light, as she murmured, "Why didn't you wake me, Mulder?" Sleep cloyed to her mouth and her tongue, made her words sticky and heavy and slow.

There was a smell on the air. Something foul and red.

She turned her head towards the driver's seat to shake Mulder awake.

Mulder was there, right beside her as he had always been. His cheeks were splashed with blood. His eyes open, mouth open, shirt open, rib cage pried open, gaping and empty.

She hadn't heard his screams.

She reached out, her hand shaking as her fingertips touched his face. Skin was cold. Rigor mortis had set and passed. He had been dead all this time while she-

Something tore through her as she fumbled for the radio to report the death. The words came hard and slow, each one stripped from her, ragged and raw and bloody.

She would need to recuse herself from the case. They would say she was too close, that she would take his death too personally.

How else would she take it though?

She closed his eyes, and shut his mouth. She took off her jacket to cover the gaping hole in his chest.

Once, before, she had found Mulder dead in the woods. Had found his body ripped open and destroyed.

He had come back.

She wanted to believe that he would come back from this death, too. But the circumstances were different. Mulder had survived because of the alien intervention and because of her own skill in realizing the virus was there, saving him without also preserving the alien that would have lived inside of him.

But there was no evidence that the extraterrestrials were here. This was something different, something unknown, when it should have just been the machinations of men capable of great harm.

"Mulder—" his name cracked between her lips as she heard the ringing sound of the sirens come too late.

She should have given him something. A blowhorn. A whistle. Something that didn't need a voice to cry for help.

Hands helped her out of the car. Hands put a blanket around her shoulders. Hands wiped Mulder's blood from her cheeks, from the drops that had splashed her lips.

She wondered if some had fallen into her mouth.

Her stomach roiled and she threw up on the ground between her feet.

They rolled Mulder away in a zipped up body bag.

They asked her how she was feeling. They asked her if she were fine. They gave her a glass of water and it slipped from her hands, shattering over her shoes and wetting her pants leg.

People talked around her, and their voices flowed over her, like rivers.

He was dead, and she was not. How could this be?

Hands guided her to the back seat of an ambulance. She shook her head at all their questions. There was nothing to be said, nothing that could explain what had happened. They still didn't know how the voices were stolen during the night, and Mulder was dead, the seventh victim. They could keep watch but the town was safe now, until they moved on to the next one, where they would be free to continue their nights of silent terror because they had succeeded in their purpose and Mulder was dead.

She bit down on the backs of her hands. They wanted to give her something to calm her mind, her nerves, a sedative—and she let them.

As she slipped under she wondered if she should have fought harder but she didn't want to fight. She didn't want to be awake as she saw through Mulder's dead and vacant eyes at the scenes around her.

She didn't want to be and the sedative turned to lead within her heart and she knew nothing for a long time, until she woke back in D.C at the hospital.

Her mother was reading a magazine beside her. She looked for Mulder, and then remembered that he was dead. She looked for her sister, and then remembered that she was dead. She looked for her father, and then remembered that he was dead.

Emptiness crushed through her, and she turned her face away from her mother, toward the blank expanse of hospital wall.

"Darling," her mother said. The papers of the magazine rustled against each other as she put it aside. "Dana." Her warm hand in hers, holding her tightly as if she might slip away into an unconscious state unless she was there, personally, to stop her.

Scully bit her lips and lay very still.

"Are you alright?"

Scully shrugged, then turned her head again to look at her mother. She looked as if she had been crying. Her eyes were rimmed with red, bloodshot and glassy. Still, she could see the sentiment shining there: thank god it had been Mulder instead of her last remaining daughter.

"Baby," her mother said, something she hadn't called her since she was an adult. "I know how you must feel right now—"

Denial rushed through her and then quickly dissipated. Of course her mother knew. Her mother had experienced loss too.

Then she would understand, wouldn't she, that nothing she could say would make anything okay? That she wouldn't be okay no matter how long they sat there and how long they talked about it.

"Please, say something."

Scully closed her eyes and let the tugging weariness pull her back under. What was there to say? She did not want to speak or to explain or to justify.

The next time she woke, they discharged her. Her mother had brought her clothes, comfortable clothes that would not have passed muster at the Bureau, clothes she would not have worn out in public if she had been given the choice. Something that looked like yoga pants, not baggy like sweatpants, but whose waistband eased against her flesh instead of cutting into her skin. Uggs because there was nothing more comfortable than them, like outdoor slippers, her mother had assured her once she had dropped them off. A flannel shirt two sizes too large so that the cuffs went over her knuckles.

It smelled like her father, and she wondered why her mother had done that, if she had even realized she had. Wondered how many days her own mother had wandered in a daze, wearing his things like they were hers, a second skin so he'd always be there with her.

She would need to clean out Mulder's apartment.

They rode in silence as her mother drove her home. She wanted to stay with Scully for a while, but Scully shook her head. "Tell me you'll be fine," her mother begged as the engine idled.

Scully could taste the exhaust fumes on her breath as she nodded.

Her mother looked resigned, but to her relief she kept the car on and then she was putting it in reverse and then she was driving away, leaving Scully alone on the curbside.

Once her mother was gone, she went to her car. It was where she had left it, the gas still just under the half full mark. She would need to go to Mulder's house, and then she would need to go to the Bureau. According to her email, she had the rest of today off. Whether or not she would take a leave of absence due to the trauma of what she had experienced would be determined tomorrow.

She drove to Mulder's house with the music up too loud, blaring through her until her bones buzzed and her breath sub-woofed through her lungs, banging up right against her heart.

It was summertime so she had the windows rolled down. The pollen whipped in through the car, burning through her eyes because she was mildly allergic. She brushed the sting away with the back of her palm.

In what felt like no time at all, she was there in front of Mulder's building. She switched the key off, and the music shut off too much, too quickly, leaving a pounding rhythm of emptiness rippling through her.

She found Mulder's key on her ring, and twisted it through the lock. The door pushed open, with that squeak that was so familiar to her. His carpet was familiar to her. The couch, still with the rumpled blankets, was familiar to her.

The roll of tape used to put an x in the window frame was familiar to her, and she picked it up the way that Mulder picked it up. Then she slid it over her hand so it dangled from her wrist like a bangle.

Mulder had done that once, after he'd had a beer or two, just slipped it over his wrist, hands on hip, striking a pose, asking her what she thought.

She didn't remember why.

She didn't remember what she had said.

She only remembered that she had laughed.

It had been long ago, one little moment on a string of little moments, some of which she remembered, some of which she didn't, some of which were just a foggy, distant haze.

Her mouth twisted as she ripped the tape from her and let it drop to the desk with a dull thud.

She went to the bedroom, which had taken him so long to fill with a bed. And, eventually, he had told her it hadn't even been his idea, that the guy who'd body-switched with him had gotten the bed and that Mulder had never found a good reason to get rid of it—then he'd looked up at her, with that lop-sided grin, and added that maybe he was just lazy.

Exhaustion bore her down, and she drooped onto the bed. The water sloshed in the mattress, like she was on the ocean, cast aside and washed away.

Salt crusted her skin as water eased under her spine. The toes of her boots scraped across the carpet. Her throat welled with a great lump and she could barely breathe around it without her entire being burning.

She shouldn't be here, she thought vaguely. This wasn't her home. This wasn't her bed, though sometimes, she had thought it could be or it might be or it already was, all she had to do was say something like yes.

She closed her eyes, and she pushed herself upwards, her elbows sinking into the mattress.

It was time to go. She needed to get back before anyone wondered where she had gone. Before people decided to come back to this apartment, his family, maybe, and guilt hung heavy on her when she realized she should not be here.

She paused, though, when she finally got up to leave, her hand on the door.

The fish.

It nosed against the tank, and she wondered if it was hungry, if someone had dropped by to feed it. Her purse slipped off her shoulder as she went forward again into his room, into his home, to stand with folded arms over the tank. The water distorted the fish as it fluttered in circles.

The tank needed to be cleaned.

She found his mini aquarium—cheap and plastic—tucked with his pots and pans in the cupboard. She filled it with water, treated it to make sure it was safe for the fish, and then she very careful transferred the fish into it.

She used a plastic Tupperware to empty the water from the glass tank until she was able to lift the glass aquarium. It was an awkward trip to the bathroom, but she managed to get there with the tank only nearly slipping from her hands once. Then she dumped the water down the tub, cleaned it out very thoroughly, rinsed it just as thoroughly, and then dried the glass with a towel.

By the time she was through, she was hot, sweaty, heart thumping in her chest and her throat dry with thirst. She rummaged through his fridge for the beer she knew he kept there, and she tucked the chilled bottles in her purse. But she wasn't foolish so she cupped her hands under his running tap and filled her mouth with water, swishing it across her tongue and over her teeth before finally swallowing it. She stashed her purse, keys, and fish food into the empty aquarium, and lugged it to the trunk of her car.

By the time she slid into the driver's seat, fish safely stowed in the passenger seat, she was exhausted. She let her head fall forward until it rested on the ceiling wheel, her vision going blotchy as she saw stars and wished she didn't have to make the drive home, but the fish was right there and it couldn't stay in the plastic hand-held aquarium forever.

She turned the key in the ignition, gunned the engine, and started on the drive home. When she pulled into the driveway, she stayed in the driver's seat for a time, rallying the will to get out and bring all that crap into her own home again.

It was exhausting, an insurmountable task, but she forced herself to do it, and when she was finally able to drop onto her own couch, when she was finally able to tip that cold bottle of beer that had once been Mulder's to her lips, when she was finally able to look at the fish swimming lazily around in a clean tank after bits of food, she thought maybe it had been worth it.

It was easier to fall asleep on the couch, without getting up to undress or brush her teeth, and when she woke earlier than she normally did, she only had to run a comb through her hair, check to see if she smelled okay, before going back to the Bureau. Her hands shifted on the steering wheel, squeezing and releasing the firm leather circle as she waited at the lights for them to turn from red to green.

She was afraid. Afraid they would take the X-files from her. Afraid they would assign her someone who wouldn't understand Mulder and the work he did. Afraid her new partner wouldn't believe as Mulder did or want to believe as she so separately did.

Sometimes, caught in the morning traffic jams, she would reach up to her swinging medallion, a doubting Thomas that Mulder had given her because she had once been Catholic and because of the doubts always stirring in her heart. She clenched her fist around it to keep the sobs at bay so she wouldn't have to pull over and dry her tears.

She was afraid they would not let her return to work at all.

She was afraid they would expect her to return as if nothing had happened.

She needed this, she needed to work.

She needed to never do anything again.

She parked in her usual space, only staying in the car to collect herself for maybe about five minutes. The walk through the dark, musty parking lot stretched longer than the handful of steps to the elevator. The ride up was slow, the light fading from flight to flight taking an age until the ding came too suddenly and the shift from upwards to stopped made her stumble, clutching the wall for balance as her heart fluttered in her throat.

People she knew strode the halls with purpose, reading files they flipped with their fingers after wetting them with a quick lick of their tongue, tucking folders under their arm as steam wafted from a fresh cup of coffee. She thought she heard them whispering about her as she passed, but knew it was just her imagination.

Once, when she had been new, she had been the water cooler gossip after her partnership with Mulder. She had been asked how she, a scientist and a medical doctor, could possibly stand to be paired with Spooky Mulder, and didn't she hope that something would happen to make it all go away, to give her another partner more suited to reality?

She wondered if they were saying those same things now. Lucky her, they would say with a small shake of their head, tragic of course, but probably for the best in the long run. Working with Mulder was a shortcut to career suicide.

If any of them dared say it to her face—

But then she was suddenly at the director's office, facing his secretary. She couldn't remember her name, but she was always there, a fixture just as permanent as Mulder's pencils in the office ceiling.

Scully stared at her now. Her hair was dyed red, cut short around the neck and shoulders. She rose when Scully stopped short of her desk. Her hands found Scully's, pressing and folding them into her own. I'm so sorry, Scully thought she was saying, I'm so sorry for your loss.

She guided Scully into one of the chairs around the office. "You're here too early." Scully heard the words sharper, clearer. She would have to wait.

Scully nodded. She could wait. She was good at waiting.

The director came in, coat smelling of fresh morning air. "You're here early," he remarked.

People kept saying that even though Scully was sure that she had been going to be late. She wondered, vaguely, what time she had left.

Her stomach ached with hunger. She had forgotten breakfast, and had had only beer for dinner. She had fed the fish, but forgotten about the bagel she had put in the toaster for herself.

She desperately wanted coffee, but the director was already ushering her to the inner sanctum of his office. He was directing her to sit. He was asking her how she was doing, and she was nodding her head. Yes, I'm fine. Of course I'm fine. I'm always fine.

"Scully," he said, "I'm going to cut the crap and get right to the chase. We think you need to take a leave of absence. It's recommended here that you do so."

Scully reached for the report he had tossed on the desk. It said she had post-traumatic stress disorder. Made sense, really. From a scientific point of view, the report was very thorough. It gave a brief overview of her symptoms, including making mention of her muteness.

She licked her lips, put the folder back together, and handed it back to the director.

"That's it?" he said. He was also rising to his feet, as if she had challenged him.

"You're not even going to fight to stay on the team, to even just man a desk or something. That's it?"

Scully spread her hands and shook her head. What would the X-files be without Mulder?

Skinner gave her the forms she needed to fill out in order to give up her gun and badge. They felt so heavy in her hands. How had she held them so easily, not so long ago, brandished them as shields or weapons or both? Mulder's was probably already there, back there, somewhere. She closed her eyes and breathed. Her bones rattled inside her, and clenched her fingers around the counter as she waited for the agent to look over the form.

"You're good," they said. "Hope to see you back soon, Special Agent."

She opened her eyes, vision blurred and then clearing. She nodded her thanks, and then turned to go. The bottoms of her shoes scuffed the tile. The corridors of the building warped into impossible tunnels extending indefinitely, without end.

Then the clear glass doors rose suddenly in front of her, the glazed lettering naming it the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the breath that Scully hadn't realized she had been holding escaped her parted lips, fogging the glass as she stepped outside.

Her shoes echoed through the parking structure. So many times she had walked here, keys clutched in her hand, struck between her knuckles as her mother had taught her. Normally it was dark, nearly empty, nearly abandoned—creepy and haunted. But today, the shimmer of afternoon sun seeped through the thick concrete walls. Cars were neatly parked in each space. It was still early. They were at their jobs. They hadn't been sent home.

Skinner was waiting for her, slouched against the hood of her car. She folded her arms when she saw him, wanting him to leave, but he was still there, blocking her way. She was no longer part of the Bureau, he was no longer her director, so she hardened her jaw and opened her front door, closing it and locking it before Skinner even knew she was there.

He slid from the car, and bent in front of the driver's window. He tapped the glass with his knuckle, but Scully stared straight ahead. The doubting Thomas medallion swayed from the vibrations, and she reached out to steady it, to hold it in her palm.

Mulder had laughed when he had given it to her.

She needed to leave.

Skinner was tapping urgently at her window, saying her name over and over. Telling her that he understood, that he just wanted what was best for her, that he missed him too, that it wouldn't be the same without him, that she couldn't do this to herself, that she couldn't just cloister herself away.

He was wrong, of course. She wasn't the one that had taken her badge and gun away from her. That would have reassigned her from the X-files.

She turned the key in the ignition, and gunned the engine. Skinner backed away, hands held up so that she could reverse her way out of the parking spot.

Relief eased the rigor in her muscles as she drove. She was afraid he would not have let her go.

What a silly thing to be afraid of.

Of course he would have let her go.

It seemed to take only a few glazed minutes to arrive at her apartment. She unlocked the door, and remembered all the times that Mulder had invited himself over, sometimes even sleeping on her couch.

She bent double to gaze at his fish. It swam aimless, little mouth pucker gaping soundlessly, so she sprinkled some food into the water, but the little thing ignored it.

Scully shrugged and wandered into her kitchen. There was some old bread, and she checked it for mold before she put two slices in the toaster. The wires rimmed red, and she watched it glow and glow before she grew bored and turned away. Her closet door was open, the clothes scattered from when she had had trouble deciding what to wear today.

She kicked off her heels, placed them side-by-side on the floor of her closet, then peeled off her panty hose.

A noise kicked behind her and she jerked her head over her shoulder, hair falling over her face as she tried to locate the source, but it was nothing probably. Just Washington D.C. Strange daytime noises she didn't recognize because she wasn't supposed to be at home so early.

There was a box in the corner of the closet, and she dragged it out, not quite remembering what was in it.

Dust billowed when she opened it, and she sneezed into the corner of her elbow. It was filled with journals that she had started when she had been young. She sat on the floor, her legs bent.

Reaching behind her, she unzipped her skirt so that the waist of it didn't dig into her belly as she opened the first journal. They were brief logs, talking about her day, about the things she had done.

She didn't remember half of them—funny they had seemed so important at the time.

Without reading them all, she closed them and put them aside, digging for the ones that weren't quite so old, that were a little more recent.

There was a moleskin journal tucked in the bottom, and her hands shook as she drew it out. They were letters she had written to Mulder when she had been sick, when she had been dying.

Taking a careful breath, she licked her lips as she opened it, turning the pages slowly and carefully as she read words she had scribed when she thought she would die before him.

Her mouth twisted as she read, puckering as she turned to the last page, the one Mulder had read when she had confessed, voice breaking with tears, that she hadn't meant for him to see that, and he had held her close, cupping her face in his palms, kissing her forehead and her cheeks in something like benediction and love—her gaze fell away from the pages, leaves whispering together because she trembled so.

She climbed to her feet, skirt sliding from her waist down her hips. Her feet dragged through the carpet as she found a pen and sat at a chair. Tucking her loose hair behind her ears, she turned to the next blank page and held the pen tip poised against the empty space.

My spirit has returned to dust and ash, blown away by the last whisper of loss that has swept all the ones I loved from me. I am left empty and barren, my body remembering the sound of your step and the tenor of your voice, hoping it is you but finally remembering your final countenance, remembering that your heart is forever closed to me now. My constant companion, my constant friend, I miss you and I bear the burden of your passing on shoulders that are not strong enough to carry the loss of your presence. I understand the feelings that fill the barren wasteland my body has become, but I do not comprehend. You were lost to me once before, but you were returned to me alive—changed, but Mulder still. I cannot accept your absence, I cannot reconcile that you are gone before me, leaving me behind to wait to join you at a time unknown.

The pen dropped from her fingers and she rose to her feet, walking to the fridge from habit. The shelves were mostly empty. There was a half-filled bottle of wine, and she weighed it in her hands before shaking her head and returning it to the door.

She found cold toast in the toaster, and ate it plain. It crunched between her feet, but it did not fill the emptiness inside of her, and she did not taste its staleness as she leaned against the counter, and ate.

During the next few days, Scully did not answer the phone calls from her mother, letting them go to voice mail. Her mother was concerned, her voice breaking as she begged Scully to please stay with them, at least for a few days, it wasn't good for her to be alone.

Scully wanted to be alone.

She sent a letter to her mother, assuring her that she was fine, but while she wrote, she had Melissa constantly on her mind. Perhaps, she considered, she should go to the graveyard. She could visit her father there. She could visit Melissa. She could visit Mulder.

Her eyes slid out the draped windows, arms clasped around her knees. She would go nowhere today. There was nothing to be done. They were gone, and she was here, and she knew that she should do something, that she was trapped in this endless cycle of grief (she recognized the stages), but she couldn't.

She could only remember. Remember the feel of the bat in their hands as he guided her stroke after stroke, the clap of the ball hitting wood ringing like thunder.

Rising to her feet, she went to the sink, full of dishes. She remembered when she had washed her dog right here—there was probably dog hair still trapped in the drain—but even he was gone too.

She opened the cabinets, out of habit, because it was getting close to six pm and she should eat, but all her dishes were dirty and her fridge was bare. She almost laughed when she pulled out a white mug stamped with BEST BOSS all in red on the side. She and Mulder had planned on giving it to Skinner for his birthday.

So much for that.

Still, she packed it carefully in a box and sent it to the Bureau, care of Walter Skinner.

He kept in contact, sometimes. Wrote her back, said thank you for the cup. Said that an Agent named Doggett had taken over the X-Files. Once, she forced herself to go into her car and she drove over there to see the place. Doggett was sitting at Mulder's desk, which was neater than Mulder had ever kept it.

The pencils lodged in the ceiling were gone.

So was the poster saying I WANT TO BELIEVE.

Doggett caught sight of her, but didn't recognize her. "Can I help you?" There was impatience in his voice.

She shook her head and hurried away, coat drawn close around her as she went to the coffee shop on the corner, the one across the bank where Mulder said they had both died over and over, caught in some kind of time loop.

Okay, Mulder, she had thought. Okay. She sighed and was halfway out the door before she realized that she had forgotten her coffee. By the time she had returned, one of the baristas had thrown it away.

It hadn't been that good anyway. Dry and tasteless as all food was.

She wandered the streets. The wind was cold and her coat wasn't thick enough. She thought of all the things she had seen with Mulder. She thought of the witches and the demons possessing that boy. She remembered the possessed doll.

She remembered a man who crafted crude dolls, who had claimed with his dying breath that he could have saved his daughter.

In that moment, she had believed him. Her thoughts turned to him now, the words turning over and over until her mouth dried up and she dared to toy with a single thought, to wonder, perhaps, if she could save Mulder in the same way he had claimed he had the power to restore his daughter.

Without her gloves, her hands were chapped and cold and she pulled them from her sleeves so she might look at them, might flex them as she waited for the walk sign to flash at her as she waited at a corner.

Maybe she was desperate. Maybe she was sad, and maybe she was tired of being sad, of grieving.

She had seen things she hadn't understood, that her small understanding of science couldn't explain. But that hadn't meant that it couldn't be true. Her hand went to the cross nestled in the hollow of her throat.

Or that a miracle couldn't occur.

It didn't take her long to find the books she needed. She already knew what she needed, had studied witchcraft off and on depending on the sort of cases they ran to. Needed to learn it to keep up with Mulder and his theories so she could rein him back, keep him in check.

He had done the same with her, learning about science and medicine. Not to the degree she had, of course, because that wasn't his way like it was hers, but it still made her heart ache when she remembered his calls when he tried to explain the phenomena of the doll.

She gathered her supplies. It said she needed possessions of the person she was trying to bring back. She had too many things of Mulders. Shirts he had forgotten. Strands of hair in her brush when he forgot to bring his comb. A toothbrush.

She gathered them all. She drew the circle, grounding her energies in a way that felt right, that seemed right from the literature she had read, from the tiny spell she had cast once or twice or several times in her studies, in her experimentations, in her scientific investigation of the craft.

Dried herbs still hung from the cupboards. Once, Mulder had found out. He had laughed for such a long time until she was laughing too. The next time he had come over, he had brought her a broom he had picked up, old and handmade and worn. It was tucked into a closet, but she dragged it out because that also felt right, it felt like him, like of course that would be something he would do.

Once she had cast the circle, she sat in the center with the book in front of her. Fear, doubt, began to seep through her spirit. Her hands played with the worn pages of the spell book.

Necromancy was serious, not for the faint of heart. Not for the novices and amateurs.

But she wanted him back. She wanted him to come back to her. She was the one that was supposed to have died first.

And she wondered at that, wondered at all the times she had escaped the hand of death. Remembered the words of the man who had told her she would not die.

She hadn't paid attention because it was the way of life to die, but cold fear frosted her heart, and her hands shook. What if it were true that she would not die, that she would never join all the ones she had lost?

She felt herself tottering at the brink of a precipice, cliffs sheering her heart into jagged pieces as she stood at the crossroads—the drop down, or the safe way back to what she had known: those silent days of grief, of waking up on the couch still tired after too much sleep, the sorrow setting in her heart like lead.

There were stories about this, morality tales warning people who wanted too much, who were greedy, who didn't want to let go.

But her hand had been open so long, and so much had been taken from her. She hadn't held on, not really, not once. She hadn't really fought. And what if she had? Would the people that were gone from her still be here now?

What if she had woken up, just once, during the night? Would Mulder still be with her now?

Her hands fell at her side and she kicked the book from her.

Guilt weighed on her, and she curled up in the circle with her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth, wondering if today was the day the tears would come.

Because she had not cried. She hadn't cried at his death and she hadn't cried at the funeral and she hadn't cried when the Bureau had sent her home and she hadn't cried when she realized that Mulder was really gone and she didn't cry now that she had decided to really and truly let him go.

But she was a barren wasteland, and so she fell into an uneasy sleep.

She dreamed, like she sometimes dreamed, of Mulder beside her. Of him pressed behind her, holding her as he touched her, as her hands gripped the pillow or his hair as her legs spread. Of his lips against her neck and then tipping her head back so he could reach her mouth.

When she woke, her hands had slipped beneath the elastic waist of her sweat pants and she pulled away from herself with a flash of guilt as she broke the circle she had cast and stumbled to her feet. Her skin was flushed, her breath coming in hollow gasps as she slowly processed the dimness in her home as evening fell.

Her hands shook as she washed them in the sink, and she refused to look at herself in the mirror as she stripped out of the too-big tee and her pants and turned the shower to scorching hot heat that scalded her skin bright red as she scrubbed herself with soap made with sand.

She stayed until she couldn't take it anymore, and when she got out, the mirror was fogged except for the word _believe_ scrawled across the surface.

Her heart jumped and she stumbled back into the stall, slipping on the wet tile, falling with a hardness that jarred the bones in her body, a dull edge of pain scudding somewhere under her skin.

She scrambled to her feet, ready to get her gun before she remembered that she had given it up to the Bureau and she did not own one registered in her name. She palmed the word away, wiping the dew left on her hand against the towel she wrapped around herself.

Again she remembered how many times the safeness of her home had been breached, the struggles to survive she had fought in this very apartment. The broken bits of furniture, the toppled tables. Her breath caught in the trap of her throat, as she crept around the corner into the kitchen, hand scrabbling for one of the steak knives she had left on the counter, something she had used to cut around bits of moldy cheese.

Mulder had been there for those times, had come to her in times of trouble and comforted her. And, as she hid in the kitchen, knife clenched in her hands, she squeezed her eyes shut, and imagined him there now. Imagined the sound of his voice, the touch of his hands on hers, the feel of his breath against her skin as he held her close.

Her muscles relaxed, and the knife clattered to the floor at her feet. She picked it up again as she rose slowly to her feet, and prowled the apartment three times in a systematic search pattern to ensure that no one was there.

Perhaps Mulder had written it into the glass the last time he had been there. Perhaps she had just never noticed.

Perhaps.

Weariness overcame her, and she stretched on the couch, the knife held loosely in her hand. She slept without dreams, and when she woke the knife was on the coffee table, and the blanket Mulder had always favored was pulled over her shoulders.

She must have woken in the night.

Sometimes, during the day, she thought she heard a slight rustling in the walls, and sent a polite notice to her landlord that there must be an infestation of something. They found nothing, but still when she felt the most lonely, the most quiet as she sat on the couch and watched the television on mute, she heard it, she heard something in the walls.

Then there was the time she had found a pencil lodged in the ceiling. She had had to stand on a chair to reach it, to pull it down from the plaster. She had stared at it for a long time, thumb traveling along its length, along the indentation of teeth where Mulder had once bit at it while he thought about something—she couldn't remember what they had been working on, but she knew that this was his pencil.

The word _believe_ still showed up in the fog of her showers. Even when she kept them short and cold, she thought she could see the ghost of it there, if she peered closely enough and really, really looked for it.

She began to force herself to leave the house every day. First it was for short walks, then longer ones. Then she started jogging in the early mornings. It forced her to breathe, to really breathe.

She had a routine down. She would lock the door behind her, stretch on the front steps, and go. When she came back, her front door eased open when she reached for the handle, and her house was warm and smelling of coffee.

There was no one ever there, just the walls of the house that had seen so much and held so much between their four corners of space and time.

Doubt whispered in her ear, but she wanted to believe that even though she had not cast her spell, Mulder had found his way back to her, as he always had before, as they always would no matter how long the distance stretching between them.

She would not say it was his ghost, but it was him.

Sometimes, when she knelt before the aquarium to watch his fish eat the food she sprinkled in the water, she thought she could see the shadow of his hand in the glass. Hesitantly, she raised her smaller hand to it, wondering, for a moment, how the glass could be warm.

There were evenings where she picked up her pen, to continue writing in the journals she had once filled with words she said in her heart but had never spoken. Maybe he would hear them from the paper, and maybe he would understand. But, as her fingers held the pen, she could not write the words she knew she needed to write: that he should not stay for her sake, that she would join him again someday because they always found each other at the end of all things.

She would always close the journal. When she was ready. When she was healed and whole once more instead of this incomplete body, this shadow of the person she had been, the ghost of the special agent she had left behind.

Skinner began leaving messages for her now. He wanted her to return to the Bureau. To be evaluated for duty. It had been over a year, and she counted the days in her head. She couldn't remember all of them.

It was time to come home, Scully. It sounded as if he was shouting at her through the receiver and she held it a few inches from her ear.

He told her that there was another town in another state where people were dying with their hearts ripped out of them.

There was silence on the phone. A pause that Scully let go on too long before she let the phone drop into the receiver.

Let Agent Doggett take care of it. He was on the X-Files now. He could solve this one, and maybe he would escape alive this time now that they knew who they were up against.

They didn't need her. She didn't need to revisit the scene of the crime pretending that those latex gloves could protect her from anything but the blood and whatever evidence they might happen to leave behind.

The temperature dropped in her apartment even though spring was well on its way, and it was air meant for a light jacket, not bundling coat with earmuffs and scarves and gloves type weather. Yet frost iced the windows, and even though she huddled in her blankets she could not get warm. Her breath came out in clouds. Her eyes stung and she paced in tight circles as she rubbed her arms.

She didn't want to go. She was afraid to go, afraid that if she went she wouldn't be able to stop it, wouldn't be able to close the case, and that more people would die, silent and afraid and alone and unheard.

Finally, lips blue and fingernails pale, she stuffed her feet into her boots, grabbed her keys from the nail she had pounded by the door, and left. On the way, she dropped by the store to pick up bottled water and sunflower seeds. She cracked them open with her teeth as she drove, spitting the shells through her open window as she got on the long stretch of highway leading to the dustbowls in the middle of nowhere.

The radio fuzzed with static, flipping to one station no matter how frequently Scully switched it back. She rolled the window down and hung her arm through the open space, letting the wind fly between her fingers, cranking the volume so she could hear the music and the static over the roar of the motor, the engine gunning as she drove and drove.

And then she was there, in that tiny town, just like all the other tiny town. The dust blew in her face like puffed cigarette smoke when she stepped out of the car, and she hid her face in her elbow as she coughed.

She had no badge to flash so she could only linger on the perimeter of the crime scene, watching Doggett collect his statements. He was repulsed by the crime, she could tell. But he also had question marks in his eyes and she knew that she should go to him, and she did when he was alone.

It took him a moment to recognize her. "You're Special Agent Scully," he said. "You here in an official capacity?"

She shook her head.

"Cat still got your tongue, huh? Well no wonder you're here as a tourist."

She glared at him.

"Look, I don't mean to be rude, but I have a crime you and Spooky Mulder couldn't solve, and you're here to what, help? But you can't because you're not technically an agent anymore. And I got your files. I hate to say you wasted a trip out here, but I think you did, Agent."

That was when she saw them, the tall gentleman and the short gentlemen, the same ones she had seen a year ago, the gentlemen with their lovely tailored suits and their lovely smiles. They were talking to the woman Scully recognized as Doggett's partner. She tugged on his sleeve and bent her head toward them.

"What, them?" he said. "They're just dentists."

Different occupation, same crime. She shook her head, vigorously, and he looked at them again. She wondered if he noticed how their smiles were too wide, how their hands were made to cut and tear. She wondered how she saw these things, and wondered if she peered through Mulder's eyes, was Mulder's witness in the final moments of his life.

The tall one caught her eye and waved, genially.

It was hard to breathe.

"Are you sure?"

He must have seen the affirmation in her eyes as he turned to join his partner. She watched him go. She wondered if he would drink coffee to stay awake. She wondered if he would survive the night.

She returned to her motel room. The mattress was uncomfortable, the quilt scratchy. She didn't undress or kick off her shoes, just laid on the mattress and set the alarm to ring a half hour before the sun was supposed to set.

In truth, she did not believe she would sleep but she did, and she dreamed familiar dreams of Mulder. They were watching his fish through the aquarium—she on one side, him on the other. The water warped his visage, made his mouth too big, his jaw crooked and weak and wobbly.

His distorted hands held a simple wooden box in their palms, and his voice came through the water. "Can't shout, can't cry," he said.

She raised her head above the aquarium, but Mulder was no longer there to be seen. She bent down again, to find him in the water and he was there, just there beyond her reach, beyond the glass.

"The Gentleman are coming by, to look in your windows, knock on your door. They need seven, so they might take yours." A shadow slanted between them, and she could barely see without the light.

Red seeped through the water, trailing from Mulder's barely parted lips as he spoke. "Can't call out, can't say a thing. You'll die screaming, but you won't be heard."

Still holding the box in his hand braced against the aquarium, he reached for her with the other. He passed through his side, the red water bubbling around his limb as he pressed his palm against the transparent wall between them. Glass cracked, splintered, shattered, spilling water through the hole, over the lip, showering her with crystal that stabbed her eyes and showered her mouth. The fish flopped on the floor, making its way towards the box, under the tall shadow of the gentlemen standing behind them, seven of them looming like jagged rocks, and when she turned, the alarm rang and there was a glare in her eyes and a stabbing pain in her head as the sun began to set.

Scully swung her legs over the edge of the bed and held her head in her hands. Breath came to her too slowly and too fast. She was dizzy, lightheaded.

She shouldn't have come. Doggett was right. What could she possibly do?

She stood up. She splashed cold water on her face, eyes searching for a trace of the word _believe_ in the dirty mirror.

There was nothing but her pale reflection.

She dried her face with a towel and stepped out just as the evening had truly settled. The streets were deserted and quiet. Even the run down building advertising bowling and roller-skating and jukebox music was quiet and dead.

It had happened, she realized. The voices were gone, and the only sound was the steady trip-trap of her footsteps on the concrete.

She swallowed around the fear welling in her throat and moved towards the dentist office where she had seen them last. They were there, all seven of them. They floated a foot or so from the ground so they towered over her.

A grey pallor rested in their cheeks. A grimace in the shape of a perpetual smile distorted their features. They peered down at her, their heads cocked like vultures as they surrounded her in a half circle, just like the shadows in her dream. She paced in her own tight circle. She could not tell them apart. They wore the same suit and the same face. Not one of them carried the box Mulder or the child had held in her dreams.

"Don't be afraid," She heard their voice in her head though their mouths had not moved. Maybe they had no voices of their own and that is why they stole the town's.

"You have nothing that we desire."

One drifted toward her, bending at the waist so that he could drag his clawed finger down the hard bone of her sternum.

Her skin crawled. She was unable to move.

"Your heart is already gone from the last time we met."

"We took it from you, just like the others."

The gentleman pushed her, hard, with the flat of his palm and she reeled back against the hard brick wall of the office. Pain tolled through her skull, and she struggled to find her balance as they disappeared into the night like shadows.

She didn't know how they chose their victims. She knew she didn't have enough time.

The box was the key, and she only knew because Mulder had shown her.

With only a single glance back over her shoulder, she opened the door of the office building. It was unlocked, and doubt worried her. Perhaps she was wrong about the box, perhaps she had come to the wrong place.

She drifted through the dark corridors until she came to the main office. Files strewed the desk, and sitting on top of them was a simple wooden box, just like the one from her dream.

With trembling hands, she lifted it. It was warm to the touch and she thought she could hear the wood shiver. When she held it to her ear, she thought she could hear voices, trapped, pushing against the wall of wood.

Maybe, if she could get it open, they could scream and they could warn each other of the approaching gentleman.

But there was no latch on the box, no key, nothing to open it. She could not even find the seam of the lid to pry it open.

It was going to happen again. Even though she knew how to stop it, she couldn't.

Mulder's death would be in vain. More people would die tonight. More people would grieve, more holes in the ground would be dug.

The box fell with a dull thud back to the desk. Anger surged through her as she slapped herself across the face and pounded her fist against the wall.

It wasn't fair. The answer was right here, but out of reach even though she had touched it. She picked up the box again and shook it, threw it against the wall in an attempt to shatter it until her breath came in ragged breaths through her mouth.

She couldn't do this. She couldn't be like this.

In cool, measured steps, she went back to the box. It was hot in her hand, and she wondered what Mulder would do if their positions had been switched.

She licked the sunflower seed salt from her lips. Thirst parched her throat. Need welled through her throat.

What Mulder do now? How she missed him. She sank into the chair, leaned back, and closed her eyes. She breathed his name, the one she could no longer call upon except in her dreams and in her grief and in her despair.

Her hands gripped the box, her nails biting into the wood. Tears streamed from her eyes and the gaping hole where her heart should have been.

A single sob broke through her lips.

The box shuddered in her hand, splintering in a shower of wood and air that gusted through her hair, breaking and shattering the windows as they escaped through the flapping blinds.

Nothing remained of the box but dust and ash that fell through her fingers.

She left the office in a daze. Doggett was there, his hands were bloody, his lip too as if he had been in a fight. She heard him describe his struggle to his partner, how the gentlemen had came, how they had set upon him, how scared he had been.

He called out to her, and she turned towards him. The gentlemen had disappeared, vanished into smoke. It was unbelievable, he hadn't seen anything like it, did she know what had happened?

But she only knew that the box had set them free, and she could not explain how she had known that, nor did she want to.

She left Doggett and his partner behind.

The drive back home was quicker than the drive there. The music stayed on the same station. She ran out of sunflower seeds and forgot to pick up more. The wind rattled the empty bag until she tucked it under her seat.

Her apartment was hot, too hot, from when she had cranked the heater from before, when it had been unearthly cold. She turned it down, and opened the windows to the cool spring breeze.

The fish darted to and fro as if it was happy to see her. She fed it then squatted down so she could watch it eat. There was no sign of the handprint that once had always been there, so she put a kiss to her finger tips and pressed it against the glass.

She knew then that she was alone.

When it was finished eating, the fish nosed the aquarium wall as it glupped at her, like it wanted to tell her something. So she whispered, "Hey, did you miss me?"


End file.
